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If we all come with pre-wired traits and with adaptations based on our past experiences, are our decisions ever truly free?

When I give talks demonstrating that we all
have innate psychological predispositions – traits that influence our behaviour
across our lifetimes – I often get asked what implications this has for free
will. If our behaviours are affected in some way by our genes or by the way our
brains are wired, doesn’t that mean that we’re really not that free after all?

The answer depends, I think, on the kind of
free will you’re after and on an understanding of the mechanisms by which we
make choices. And let me say at the outset that we do make choices. The idea
that neuroscience has somehow done away with free will altogether or proven
that it is an illusion is nonsense. All neuroscience has shown is that when you
are making decisions, things are happening in your brain. This is, to put it mildly, not a surprise –
where else would things be happening? And it really has no…

GWAS (genome-wide association studies) for
psychiatric illnesses may be about to become a victim of their own success. The
idea behind these studies is that common genetic variation – ancient mutations
that segregate in the population – may partly underlie the high heritability of
common psychiatric and neurological disorders, such as schizophrenia, autism,
epilepsy, ADHD, depression, and so on. The accumulating evidence from over ten
years of GWAS strongly supports that idea, with many hundreds of such risk
variants now having been identified. The problem is it’s not at all clear what
to do with that information. GWAS are a method to carry out a kind of
genetic epidemiology, based on a simple premise – if a particular genetic
variant at some position in the genome (say an “A” base, as opposed to a “T” at position 236,456 on chromosome 9) – is associated with an increased risk
of some condition, then the frequency of the “A” version should be higher in
people with the condition than pe…